T w e n t y S i d e d
Still busy this week. I did manage to play a bit of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, nothing new to say about it, just a good game.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Desert Bus for Hope has been on this week, so Three Houses has been on pause. Instead I picked up the dlc for Brotato, as something to do while half paying attention to the stream. It’s fine, good, etc. Several new characters, weapons, new map. The curse mechanic is odd ’cause curse is basically all upside? It makes random enemies more powerful but you get more loot, certain characters get more powerful, and cursed items are themselves more powerful and appear more often the more cursed you are. This is the first time I’ve really made it any distance on endless, because curse is huge. But hey, fun new superpowers. The new monsters on the new map are a welcome change of visual, going back to the old map trying to figure out how to do a no-curse run for an unlock (didn’t help- the monsters which give you curse on kill still spawn) was very bleh. But that’s all I’ve played since last week.
Finished Tales of Arise. The ending was messy. Not necessarily A Mess, nearly all the pieces worked, but it had a lot more pieces than it needed, and failed to answer a couple of questions. I guess I should give it spoiler tags? Anyway,
the beginning of the game is extremely straightforward; defeat the Five Anime Generals and their mysterious Sovereign. Then we defeat the Five Anime Generals and the Sovereign, at which point the game introduces three more villain factions, but then before we deal with any of the three we get a fourth one that supercedes them all. (I’ve started calling it Accordion Villainry, when a game introduces several different enemy factions and then collapses them into one. Especially when they do it more than once, which Arise does.) And when the heroes go to fight the final boss they had no fewer than four separate plans for how to kill it. They really should have just picked one, two at the most. Both for the number of plans and for the number of villains.There’s a twist in the late game that I actually liked a good bit, but I don’t know why. Turns out
the personal curse that stops the heroine from touching people, is actually a world-ending threat that’s been held in check by her previously unrevealed Goddess powers.This has led me to wonder why exactly I’m okay with that twist, when I generally hate storylines that expand on threats from people’s backstories. Part of it is surely that it’s been a front story the whole time, but I’m thinking there’s an aspect of “Tell, don’t show” that’s important for making it work; the boundaries of the thing have already been established, so before we get to actually change it we have to have a scene spelling out that the previous rules are wrong and being thrown out, which we do in Arise but not in other stories.The game features near-omnipresent in-battle shouts, which are great because it’s really easy to mishear them so I spent the whole game listening to, just, the dumbest warcries. “I can carve through water!” “Keep an eye on your arse!” “FLORIDA!” It makes everything more farcical and I’m glad it’s there.
I don’t see myself replaying this one. Berseria’s got it beat both in terms of story engagement, and in terms of mindless combat and number-go-up joy. Strangers of Paradise has it beat in terms of difficulty and nuanced control. Even in terms of weirdly complicated endings, it just made me want to replay Soul Nomad and the World Eaters. Soul Nomad’s plot was messy from Go and didn’t really pull together in the end, but I thought was surprisingly compelling throughout. Just not much to look forward to in Arise, no big standout moments or anything.
The post-game features “portals to other dimensions,” aka previous Tales games. The first one was the Destiny Rift. The boss was a character from Tales of Zestiria and not from either of the Tales of Destiny games, which upsets me quite a lot actually.
…
…think I also played Brotato? It’s Brotato.
So, I’m still replaying through Vampire Survivors and as tantalizing the new DLC is I still can’t bring myself to play it because of my stupid obsession of unlocking everything else first. And man, there’s just so much content to go through. But I’m getting closer.
I was in the mood for a LEGO game, so I’m also playing LEGO game. Look, they’re all mostly the same, it doesn’t matter. It’s all just mindless fun for a bit. I think the only one I haven’t played is the Incredibles one, and I really don’t think it’s going to include any meaningful change to the formula. The latest Star Wars one was supposed to be a major rehaul and all it did was add busywork. I’m sticking to the classics.
I bought the recently released Neva, from the makers of GRIS, but I haven’t been able to play it yet because my goddamn hard drive is full and the game is at least 10 GB larger than I expected. I really need to get some of these games out of my system before trying that one.
I started playing Oxygen Not Included, five years late.
This game is way too hard for me, I love it.
I didn’t manage to play anything this week, as errands took over the one day that I play games. However, I’m on track to pick up my Smuggler character in The Old Republic and even continue with Mass Effect 3 this week, which will be nice.
I just read about a Warhammer mod for Bannerlords. I was thinking about re-instsalling and checking that out.
I recently played and finished Life is Strange: Double Exposure, which is a direct sequel to the first game where you play as Max Caulfield again. Among other things, it got me thinking about an article on this site… because I think they hit story collapse with about half the players in the first two scenes.
For those who haven’t played the first game (allegedly marketers claim you can play this one as a starting point to the series, but this is about as much of a lie as when EA’s marketers said it about Mass Effect 3)
it ends with a choice for you to either undo all of the time travel you’ve done over the course of the game and thus also remove the storm threatening the town, but also dooming the childhood friend (and probable lesbian romance) you saved at the start with it, or decide not to and the two of you leave the town together.So we have at best a clear ending-divergence problem for any sequel following up on this with the same protagonist, which is what DE is doing. I think despite its smaller scale than something like Mass Effect or Dragon Age it’s actually a harder problem: you might affect less on some global perspective than something like who rules Orzammar or whether you cure the genophage, but as a percentage of what’s presented in the story the effects of LiS’ ending are almost 100%.Oh, and it’s probably also worth noting that LiS1 and 2 were developed by Dontnod, while Before the Storm, True Colors, and now this game were developed by Deck Nine, but all published by Square Enix.
So we start this new one, and
we are asked which ending happened, but if Chloe lived she and Max broke up. Given the rest of the story and how its narrative parallels really fit the ending where Chloe dies much better (you have multiple setups where Max compares the events of this game to her own experiences, and on my ending these were either about the various unnamed people in Arcadia Bay dying or Chloe leaving, neither fitting nearly as well as the obvious parallel that didn’t happen). I feel like it was written for the Sacrifice Chloe ending first, then someone came around and said “hey, at best you’re going to make half of the people who want to see a direct sequel unhappy, and just who do you think is most interested in seeing a direct sequel with the same protagonist?” But by doing this the entire purpose of making the people who chose this ending satisfied or at least okay with the story is mostly instantly defeated. Though perhaps the “order the $30 more expensive ultimate edition of the game and get early access to the first two chapters” scheme indicates someone recognized this but only accounted for it in terms of “how can I extract money from these people now?”But in terms of parallels, probably the most striking is how we discover, after starting the ‘your best friend is killed by gunshot and you see her alive again with your powers, and you investigate the truth of what happened’ again with a new best friend (Safi) and new powers (you’re now shifting between two alternate timelines), that the culprit for the murder we’re investigating… is Max herself, or some version of her, as seen in a photo taken by Safi. It turns out this is because Safi also has powers (she can shapeshift by altering people’s perceptions) and they’ve gone haywire in the future, so Max goes back to stop her from being able to do that at her request. There’s a clear narrative question here of “but could you sacrifice your best friend if you had to shoot her yourself?” which if you didn’t sacrifice your best friend in the original game makes no sense to ask. However, even if you’re on the more fitting path, the plot really starts going off the rails after this. We have a cop investigating us, and he comes into our home without a warrant (Max just lets him in!) and sees the incriminating photo sitting on our kitchen counter. This gets resolved when we meet him up on the overlook where Safi died, he runs into an echo of himself investigating yesterday, and their collision causes them to be annihilated from all of time; this guy now never existed. The fact that people can be erased from time now has no consequences to anything else that happens. We get to the part where the town’s being destroyed by Safi’s powers, and this involves the creation of a storm just like the one from the first game. We decide to… take a third option and walk straight into it (??) which leads to a nightmare sequence (another “let’s do what the first game did but worse” moment) and we fix things and end up not shooting Safi (it’s not even a choice!). Ultimately we end with Safi no longer wanting to die, but wanting to seek out other people with powers. There’s an post-end-credits scene of her talking to a minor character of this game like an MCU stinger! It ends with “Max Caulfield will return”! So apparently someone at Square wants to make this into an MCU-like universe or something? Which considering their track record with actual Marvel games seems like a laughable idea on multiple levels.
Well I had been going to play it myself and hope, but you sounded foreboding enough I cracked the spoiler and then cracked the second spoiler and. . . yeesh. Maybe I’ll hate-play it? Eh, probably not.
I’m glad I could help! (And I started laughing when you said I ‘sounded foreboding’. Not denying it, though.) Well, I’d be more glad if the game was actually good, but given that it’s not… yeah. I think I wanted to play it because I know that if I’d been able to go into the first one knowing nothing it would have been a very interesting experience, and I wanted to have something like that. Alas, here we are.
Come to think of it, I didn’t even cry when I played this game. Is it really even a Life is Strange game if it can’t make you cry?
Oh, I was also going to mention that it got nominated at the Game Awards for ‘Games for Impact’. I don’t really think that ‘making a whole group of fandom lesbians very disappointed’ is the kind of impact they’re looking for…
Factorio: Space Age – I just landed on Gleba. It was a rocky start because the two types of fruit trees that you need for everything were literally on opposite sides of the map, and surrounded by marshy terrain that you can’t build on, so I had to mass-produce conveyor belts and landfill with almost no automation just to get basic resources started.
The spoilage mechanic results in some really wacky-looking factory designs. Basically, Biochambers are like burner machines but worse, because the fuel they “burn” can also spoil. I’ve only barely started producing basic ores, and I already have this weird sushi belt “circulatory system” that runs past every machine in order to filter out spoilage and provide nutrients.
Pentapods seem like a cool enemy to fight, but I’ve only had a few encounters so far.
I’d really like to enjoy the Outer Wilds. But it’s just too frustrating.
You go to a place. There’s interesting lore to be found. But then, some random bullshit kills you, or gets in your way, and then you have to start from scratch. Sure, it’s a time loop game and failure doesn’t mean much…but it DOES mean another 10-15 minutes of travel back to that place, so that I can find another way to do the thing. That I wanted to do. Tha meant what I was doing in my 22-minute time loops had a purpose.
Welp, try again, genius. Maybe in few cycles you’ll have a reason to put the effort in.
I started Eden Crafters.
Exciting at first, then it becomes busywork, then you get new features to automate busywork, then your base is a mess, then you can expand… This is how it toes. I do like it so far. I’m not sure about replayability.